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The purpose of evidence adduced in support of a theory is not to prove that theory true but to demonstrate that competing theories account for facts less well and thus no longer demand our attention. Evidence therefore, if it can unambiguously decide between competing theories, helps the discipline to spend its resources on only a few issues at a time. I evaluate this winnowing capacity of various kinds of evidence which have been offered in support of hypotheses on what knowledge native speakers' have about the sound patterns in their language and how they use it: surface sound patterns, sound change, poetry, speech errors, word games, and experiments. I argue that experiments provide evidence of the highest quality. Four experiments are reported, three psychological and one phonetic, which offer evidence on the following claims: (a) the psychological basis of speakers' awareness of phonotactics, (b) speakers' awareness of the morphemic constituents of complex derived words, (c) whether epenthetic stops of the sort evident in words like team[p]ster are added by purely mechanical constraints of the articulatory apparatus or whether they can be attributed to higher, pre-phonetic levels, and (d) the factors that determine speakers' assignment of allophones to phonemes.

Generative phonological research has typically relied heavily on gratuitous assumptions about the particular morphemic decompositions that are by convention treated as data, about the relevance of those decompositions to the determination of underlying forms, and about the individuation of linguistic phenomena. I discuss a number of topics that take on a different complexion when these gratuitous assumptions are avoided: the identification of particular segments as making up underlying forms, which is far more problematic than has hitherto been recognised; various prior studies that can be interpreted as showing that ‘Vowel Shift’, while playing some role in the competence of speakers of English, has much less generality than standard tenets of generative phonology would lead one to expect; and individual variation in perceived morphemic relations among words. I report on an experiment that demonstrates the existence of such variation and provides evidence for individual differences in the system of vowel alternations and in the status of vowel shift alternations in that system.

This paper reviews the recent experimental evidence bearing on the issue of the psychological reality of the phoneme, particularly its general CLASS character, the relative NON-DISCRIMINABILITY of its positional variants (allophones), and its status as a discrete SEGMENT. Evidence bearing on a few selected problems of English phonemics is also discussed. All of the experiments cited, however, seem to have been to some extent contaminated by orthographic effects; moreover, a host of other studies go so far as to suggest that knowledge of spelling may not only impinge critically on phonological judgements, but that the very ability to segment speech may be a by-product of learning an alphabetic orthography. But as the experiments to date have been largely restricted to overt judgements about a rather limited range of words, the possibility still remains open that a phonemic segmentation of speech may well occur at an unconscious, perceptual level even in the pre-literate period.

A basic assumption of generative and lexical phonology is that lexical entries of morphemes contain abstract phonological representations (APRs), and that surface pronunciations are derived from them by rules. Whether and how such a system can be acquired is problematic. This paper looks at the acquisition of APRs for English vowels and the Vowel Shift Rule (VSR), and tries to ascertain (1) whether VSR has any psychological reality, (2) at what age this psychological reality begins to be manifested, and (3) what the source of any psychological reality of VSR is. It finds that (1) pre-literate children show no signs of knowing VSR, (2) literate children and adults show marginal knowledge of only those VSR relations represented by the English vowel letters, and (3) the source of this knowledge can be demonstrated to be the learning of spelling conventions. It is concluded that theories which posit more concrete lexical representations are supported by this evidence.

One of the pivotal claims of the generative approach to English phonology is that a rule essentially duplicating the historical changes of the English Great Vowel Shift is a part of the phonological competence of contemporary speakers of the language (Chomsky & Halle 1968). Though experiments designed to test this claim have shown that some of the alternations predicted by such a rule (VSR) are at least marginally productive for speakers, a counter-claim has also been proposed (Moskowitz 1973; Jaeger 1980) that this limited productivity is the result of knowledge of the familiar spelling rule (SR) that relates the ‘long’ vs. ‘short’ pronunciations of the five English vowel letters.

A comparison between the phonological and orthographic theories shows that certain back vowel alternations are crucial for distinguishing between them, and that certain others critically distinguish the Chomsky & Halle version of the VSR from the more recent reformulations of Halle (1977) and Halle & Mohanan (1985). A concept formation experiment was therefore conducted to determine which of these back vowel alternations were included in the vowel shift set. The results showed that all of the predictions of the SR were confirmed, whereas all three versions of the VSR were falsified on at least one count. Moreover, data from English spelling–sound regularities also proved to be highly predictive of the gradation of the responses found in this study, lending rather conclusive support to the view that the SR is responsible for all that has been found to be productive about the vowel shift phenomenon.

A corpus of more than 500 speech errors that involve a vowel or syllabic nucleus is examined for evidence that bears on the nature of the processing representation that is in force when such errors occur. Evidence is obtained from the patterns of similarity between target segments and the intrusion segments that replace them in errors, on the assumption that target– intrusion similarity arises from characteristics of the processing representation. Findings include (1) a distinctive feature similarity between vowel targets and intrusions, (2) evidence that complex syllabic nuclei can function as error units and (3) evidence that vowel errors are constrained by lexical stress. Finally, the error patterns in both vowels and consonants, and the processing representations they suggest, are evaluated in the light of recent theoretical proposals about the phonological component of the grammar.

Speech errors have often been used to support the psychological reality of phonologically dependent allomorphy in inflectional rules. The phenomenon of morphological accommodation to phonological errors is the most compelling evidence of this sort. We investigate reduplication in Ewe, experimentally inducing phonological errors to see whether reduplicated forms show accommodation. This was the case. Implications for reduplication in Ewe and for models of language production are discussed.

Two bodies of recent research from experimental psycholinguistics are summarised, each of which is centred upon a concept from phonology: LEXICAL STRESS and the SYLLABLE. The evidence indicates that neither construct plays a role in prelexical representations during speech recognition. Both constructs, however, are well supported by other performance evidence. Testing phonological claims against performance evidence from psycholinguistics can be difficult, since the results of studies designed to test processing models are often of limited relevance to phonological theory.

The problem discussed is which CV sequences are generally favoured or disfavoured in the languages of the world, and the reasons for the trends. An investigation of relative frequencies of CV combinations in five languages is presented. The main result is that the favoured sequences are those in which there is no great movement of the articulatory organs from the consonant to the vowel. Examples are combinations of a dental consonant and a front vowel, and a velar consonant and a back vowel.

To address the claim that listener misperceptions are a source of phonological shifts in nasal vowel height, the phonological, acoustic and perceptual effects of nasalisation on vowel height were examined. We show that the acoustic consequences of nasal coupling, while consistent with phonological patterns of nasal vowel raising and lowering, do not always influence perceived vowel height. The perceptual data suggest that nasalisation affects perceived vowel height only when nasalisation is phonetically inappropriate (e.g. insufficient or excessive nasal coupling) or phonologically inappropriate (e.g. no conditioning environment in a language without distinctive nasal vowels). It is argued that these conditions, rather than the inherent inability of the listener to distinguish the spectral effects of velic and tongue body gestures, lead to perceptual misinterpretations and potentially to sound change.

We propose an approach to phonological representation based on describing an utterance as an organised pattern of overlapping articulatory gestures. Because movement is inherent in our definition of gestures, these gestural ‘constellations’ can account for both spatial and temporal properties of speech in a relatively simple way. At the same time, taken as phonological representations, such gestural analyses offer many of the same advantages provided by recent nonlinear phonological theories, and we give examples of how gestural analyses simplify the description of such ‘complex segments’ as /s/–stop clusters and prenasalised stops. Thus, gestural structures can be seen as providing a principled link between phonological and physical description.